The book is printed out and all over my floor. I was hoping that if I squinted just right, I would see the finished product and know what to do to get there.

And then of course, there’s E.L. Doctorow breaking my balls:

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I’ve come to the devastating conclusion that I may have stopped writing this book a long time ago. All my obsessively making revisions to existing pieces and letting off steam in these blog posts are just me idling the car at a rest stop, using Armor-All wipes to polish it up. I’m stuck here, and I’m sad and angry and I want more fucking time and less fucking jobs and I concede that it will have to wait until after the wedding.

That’s not the part that worries me most of all. The part that worries me is: will I be able to remember misery when I am happy? Or will I engage in subterfuge against my own happiness to recreate the misery I need to connect with to write the rest of the book?

I know a lot of mothers and wives have achieved a remarkable balance between writing and living, but I am so far from it, I ache. I physically ache, thinking about a distant future in which I can write fearlessly, freely, and for hours. Do I need to sequester myself to some abby to finish this book, alone and far from the things that make me feel complete?